Faculty Forum: September 2017

Faculty Forum is a monthly feature written by Teri Baxter highlighting the achievements of faculty at UT Law including publications in academia and the media, speaking engagements, interviews, awards, and other accomplishments.

TaxProf Blog’s Article of the Week for the first week of September was Professor Eric Franklin Amarante’s article with Lori D. Johnson and Jeanne Frazier Price, Research Instruction and Resources in the Transactional Skills Classroom: Approaches to Incorporating Research Instruction into Transactional Skills Courses.  According to the blog post, “Everyone who teaches transactional courses should read this article.”

Professor Brad Areheart has been awarded the second annual Michael J. Zimmer Memorial Award at the 12th annual Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law at Texas A&M University School of Law. Labor and employment law professors selected Professor Areheart for the award, which recognizes “a rising scholar who values workplace justice and community, and who has made significant contributions to the field of labor and employment law scholarship.”

Professor Ben Barton’s book with Professor Stephanos Bibos, Rebooting Justice, received a favorable review in the Wall Street Journal article titled “The Case for Fewer Lawyers.” The author notes that the book “ask[s] the right questions. And regardless of whether one accepts all of its recommendations, ‘Rebooting Justice’ does jump-start a much-needed conversation about the future of the practice of law.”

Earlier this month, Professor Teri Baxter participated in the “Teachers Law School,” a program co-sponsored by the Tennessee Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocacy (ABOTA) Foundation and the Federal Bar Association. Tennessee middle and high school teachers traveled to United States District Courthouse in Chattanooga to learn about the federal court system and state and federal law from lawyers, professors, and federal district court judges.  Professor Baxter spoke about State Rights v. Federal Rights.

Professor Zack Buck spoke to the Tennessee Bar Association Health Law Section at London Amburn in Knoxville last month. The title of the talk was “The ABCs of Healthcare.” The program was “designed for new lawyers – offering an introduction to health law as a practice area and career.”

Professor Joan Heminway was co-author of a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief filed recently in Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System. The case addresses a very technical—but critical—matter:  whether a public company’s noncompliance with a mandatory disclosure rule adopted under the federal securities laws is actionable as securities fraud.

Professor Heminway recently moderated a panel as part of the campus Faculty Senate retreat on Tennessee’s Campus Free Speech Protection Act.  The panelists included Vince Carilli (the campus’s Vice Chancellor for Student Life), Frank Lancaster (one of the university’s associate general counsel), and Matt Scoggins (the university’s general counsel and a UT Law alum).

Professor Heminway and Professor George Kuney provided commentary at an event sponsored by the UT Law chapter of The Federalist Society featuring Karin Agness Lips.  The program focused on how colleges and universities have failed students with respect to safe spaces, sexual assault, and student debt.

The Board of Directors of the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) recently announced that Professor Lucy Jewel is the inaugural recipient of the Teresa Godwin Phelps Award for Scholarship in Legal Communication.  “The Phelps Award honors and draws attention to individual works of outstanding scholarship specific to the legal writing discipline that are published in any given calendar year. The award is meant to set aspirational standards for others writing in the field. . . . The Selection Committee unanimously recommended Professor Jewel for the inaugural Phelps Award to recognize her 2016 article, ‘Old School Rhetoric and New School Cognitive Science: The Enduring Power of Logocentric Categories.’ . . . The selection committee praised Professor Jewel’s article, remarking ‘the article does a good job of building on a base of scholarly research, and it will reach practitioners with insights that are simultaneously theoretical and useful.  The article will also remind LRW teachers that theory (in this case, cognitive theory) should reach into the classroom.’”

Professor Alex Long’s article Retaliation Backlash will appear in volume 93 of the Washington Law Review.

On September 13, 2017, Professor William Mercer gave the Dr. Paul Bergeron Constitution Day lecture at the Blount Mansion.

Professors Glenn Reynolds and Brad Areheart hold the first and second spots respectively on the SSRN list of Top Downloads for Professor Reynolds’s essay Congressional Control of Presidential Pardons and Professor Areheart’s paper The Top 100 Law Reviews: A Reference Guide Based on Historical USNWR Data.

Professor Glenn Reynolds’s article Congressional Control of Presidential Pardons will appear in an upcoming issue of the Nevada Law Journal. The article is currently the number one downloaded article on SSRN. Professor Reynolds is the #10 law professor for downloads on SSRN this year, #12 in the all-time ranking.

Professor Reynolds also participated in a panel on September 12 with Tenn. State Rep. Martin Daniel and the Tennessee Beacon Center’s Mark Cunningham on crony capitalism, state subsidies, and their unfortunate impact on poor and minority businesses, prior to a showing of the documentary, “Rigged:  The Injustice of Corporate Welfare,” in which Professor Reynolds is interviewed.

The Bloomberg BNA article “Bayer-Monsanto Deal Stares Down Hurdles at One Year” cited a white paper written by Professor Maurice Stucke and his Konkurrenz colleague Allen Grunes, recommending that U.S. antitrust authorities block the merger and identifying markets that could be stumbling blocks for the deal.

The article “John McLellan: How can we shape the future of digital news?” in the Scottish newspaper, The Scotsman, addressed the problem of social media sites using content generated by news media publishers to attract viewers without sharing the revenue with those publishers. In addition, it warns that social media can spread “fake news” by showing content targeting the views and biases of users using harvested data. The article quotes a paper written by Professors Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi, which said: “The super-platforms can squeeze millions of sellers, including photographers, photojournalists, writers, journalists and musicians… The super-platforms’ economic power can translate into political power: [they] can shape our political views and the public debate.”

AIA News published “The Networks of Control” by Professors Maurice Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi. Professor Stucke was also quoted in the Canada’s Lawyer’s Daily article “Competition Bureau’s approach to antitrust law needs to catch up with the times.”

Professor Maurice Stucke was quoted in the Politico article “Margrethe Vestager’s growing American fan club.” The article discusses the growing popularity of Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s competition commissioner, who has taken on and levied hefty fines against Silicon Valley tech giants Google and Apple. “’There is an awareness among practitioners and academics that the U.S. has lost its intellectual leadership on monopolization,’ said Maurice Stucke, a lawyer, professor and author of ‘Virtual Competition,’ a smash-hit on the antitrust conference circuit that explores how companies’ use of big data and algorithms will challenge antitrust enforcers.”

Professor Stucke was also quoted in an article on Wired.com titled “Google’s Search Changes My Not Level Playing Field.” In the article, Professor Stucke expresses doubt about whether Google’s decision to allow rivals to “bid on coveted advertising spots that it previously reserved for itself at the top of product search results in Europe” will curb monopolistic behavior. “Merely telling them ‘You can’t do this in the future,’” may not be sufficient, Stucke says. “Now they have such an inherent advantage that even if they don’t engage in this behavior, they still win.”

Professor Val Vojdik presented at the Tennessee Bar Association’s Annual LGBT Section’s Forum (CLE) on September 22 in Nashville.  Her panel was “Legislative and Caselaw Update” and she discussed current developments in Title VII involving LGBT issues.

Dean Melanie Wilson published a piece in the September edition of KBA’s Dicta. The article discusses the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision in State v. Johnson, which has been read to declare that the accused in a criminal case can compel victims and witnesses to obtain and produce their relevant social media and other electronic communications before trial when the Court actually lacked jurisdiction to decide the issue, which was “nonjusticiable.”

Dean Wilson also spoke to a group of judges and lawyers at the University of Arkansas as part of the law school’s annual trial practice conference.  She spoke on the admissibility of electronic evidence and the proposed amendments to the federal rules addressing the self-authentication of electronic evidence.